6" solid screen, good support for EPUB + PDF?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Aleron Ives

You might consider buying the Boox Poke 5. It's 6", but since it's an Android tablet, you get extensive formatting options. You can turn the reader on its side to read in landscape mode to give yourself more screen real estate, as one example (at the expense of only viewing half a page at a time).

Forget this. It's again a 6" screen. It won;t work well enough for PDF.

There is NO 6" Reader that works well with PDF. NONE AT ALL! So either forget PDF or forget a 6" screen and go larger.

I don't want the OP reading this misinformation and thinking it's OK to buy.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by Aleron Ives

You might consider buying the Boox Poke 5. It's 6", but since it's an Android tablet, you get extensive formatting options. You can turn the reader on its side to read in landscape mode to give yourself more screen real estate, as one example (at the expense of only viewing half a page at a time).

You can do that on a Kobo too, even some older models with no rotation can have rotation enabled and set to Landscape. Not at all unique to Android.
It's still rubbish on a 6″ screen. I tried it.

[Shohreh]

Turns out that PDFs with simple layouts are readable by enabling "Reflow text" and "Crop margins" in the Bookeen Saga. Headers are still displayed but I can live with that, as long as footnotes are preserved.

I guess I'll just get a 10" e-reader for the times I need to read PDFs at home, and forget about reading those on the 6" reader while travelling.

I'm still curious about why PDFs are a problem on small e-readers, though. Is it because PDF is actually a graphical language underneath, with no notion of text (what looks like text to humans is just graphics under the hood, and could just as well be pictures), so the software can't easily "reflow" the text to fit a smaller screen?

Also, what does k2pdtopt really do? Besides cropping pages to remove useless space around each page, does it try to move "text" chunks around so they fit in the screen, ie. update their x,y coordinates?

For those not having Microsoft Word and its apparently excellent Reflow feature to read a PDF and convert it to text… what about the following :

PDF → k2pdtopt → Calibre/LibreOffice Draw → EPUB

?

[JSWolf]

PDF is a problem because most PDF have wide margins and are designed for letter or A4 size pages.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by Shohreh

Turns out that PDFs with simple layouts are readable by enabling "Reflow text" and "Crop margins" in the Bookeen Saga. Headers are still displayed but I can live with that, as long as footnotes are preserved.

I'm still curious about why PDFs are a problem on small e-readers, though. Is it because PDF is actually a graphical language underneath, with no notion of text (what looks like text to humans is just graphics under the hood, and could just as well be pictures), so the software can't easily "reflow" the text to fit a smaller screen?

The 'Reflow Text' works with very few PDFs.

PDFs are a problem because the designer / publisher sets a physical page size. What looks like text can be text, or not. It can be program code generating text, actual text, vectors or bit-map images or a mix of these on different logical layers. The text in a PDF need not even be sequential so copy/paste or 'reflow' may even change the ordering of sentences, words, paragraphs, images, captions and headings on the screen vs the original virtual page.

A PDF has a design time physical page. The only way to display it electronically without breaking it (and sometimes at all) is either to shrink it to fit (will usually make it unreadable), or use the screen as view port you pan around the virtual page. It is not an ebook, but a preview of a paper print job. Forcing a 'reflow' hardly ever works well and not at all if it's complex or a scan. The user can't change fonts, font size, margins (other than crop, which nearly all viewers inc Kobo can do) or line-spacing.

I've tried programs like that on the Onyx, almost none of my PDFs reflow.

A real ebook has only content. It has nothing about page or screen sizes, though images may be set to resize to suit a screen (any size screen). A properly designed ebook lets the user change fonts, font size, side margins and line-spacing. Sometimes justification can be changed. If you "zoom" in or out the number of pages change and it reflows.

For those not having Microsoft Word and its apparently excellent Reflow feature to read a PDF and convert it to text… what about the following :
PDF → k2pdtopt → Calibre/LibreOffice Draw → EPUB

Fantasy.

Also MS Word is hardly better than free Libre Office. If you can't copy / paste good text from a PDF viewer into Word it won't help, and if you can then free LO Writer is perfect.

Once in a blue moon I'll try and convert a PDF and it's rarely smooth. Often converting it to image, OCR and proof the OCR in LO Writer works best.

Unless you have the rights and are publishing, or it's reference you need frequently portable (and you've nothing portable the PDF is any use on) you don't convert a PDF to epub. Too much work.

[Shohreh]

I'm going through k2pdfopt's page.

The output file size (in bytes) is large. Can I make it smaller?

With the default conversion, which allows text re-flow, every converted page is a bitmap, so the file size of the converted file is often larger than the original; however, many e-readers can process PDF files made up of bitmaps faster and with less memory overhead than the original PDF file, so you might still prefer this type of conversion. […] If you don't need text re-flow, you might try using a mode which converts using native PDF output.

→ When doing "text re-flow", does it 1) grab "text chunks" that sit outside the right margin, 2) move them leftwards + downwards, and 3) joins all the chunks into a bitmap — unless the user chose "native PDF output", so text remains as PDF instructions?

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by Shohreh

I'm going through k2pdfopt's page.



→ When doing "text re-flow", does it 1) grab "text chunks" that sit outside the right margin, 2) move them leftwards + downwards, and 3) joins all the chunks into a bitmap — unless the user chose "native PDF output", so text remains as PDF instructions?

It's irrelevant what it does for 'reflow' because:
1) Mostly it doesn't work (PDF creator's fault).
2) PDFs often have much fancier layout than regular ebooks, even when 'reflow' works (a small percentage of PDFs) the result is often poor, so you read what ever it was on a 10″+ LCD/OLED tablet (only Scribe is 300 dpi), or maybe it works on the 8″ Kobo Sage (no use of old scanned magazines, but great for most manual / instruction books as they are usually for a smaller than US Comic Book paper size. Far better than the 7″ Libre/Libra2/Oasis (2 or 3) or 6.8″ Android eink. Forget 6″.
And the Kobos now do save crop margin settings per PDF.

On the 8″ Sage I now have about half dozen scanned PD Victorian novels, maybe 30 manuals /instructions, and perhaps a dozen technical references. Only a few of these PDFs useable on the 7″ ereader and maybe 2 instruction on a 6″.

Though the 10.3″ Elipsa is lower pixel count the text is too small on old multi-column magazines to be able to read on the 8″ Sage and the 10.1″ LCD Android tablet not good enough. I've a 10.9″ higher resolution LCD Android tablet on its way, which allegedly is also reading optimised (not shiny). It will not do all PDFs, but more.

There is always the 23″ 4K HDR paper like desktop which is a generation or two past IPS LCD screens.

I used to use ImageMagick or The Gimp to fix badly done scans in PDFs and reduce from full colour to 4bit mono. But k2pdfopt is simpler. Sometimes I still import a PDF to the GIMP (setting a new resolution). It makes an image with a layer per page. Then I can crop entire image and also use curves to adjust black, white & gamma, then convert to 4 bit (black, white & 14 greys to suit eink) as that allows better readability on text than 1 bit. Then rexport as PDF (earlier version of The GIMP had to export a mpng which was then converted by ImageMagick to PDF.

The k2pdfopt is great, but I'd only use it to crop, brighten, contrast, resolution and convert to 16 shade (4 bit) mono. If 'reflow' worked then so would copy & paste to LO Writer, which I have done. You still need a decent size ereader and a PDF.

I've been fighting PDFs for 20 years. I still make them myself, for upload to POD (paper). I have to proof format/layout on the big 23″ 4K screen, because mistakes can creep in. Years ago I used Adobe tools or DTP, then a plug-in on MSWord, but now it's a direct export from a LO Writer odt file. Content is proofed via odt edit, extra Save As docx -> epub. Annotations back to desktop (KATE) via Calibre from the Kobo. Originally the paper free work flow used a Kindle (till about 2016).

[Shohreh]

Looks like I'll get a 10" Kobo to read PDFs.

[Quoth]

It depends on the PDF if 8″ Sage (more pixels than Elipsa), 10.3″ Elipsa, big colour tablet, or QHD (or 4K) PC screen is best.

I bought my Sage after the Elipsa and now don't use the Elipsa.

[Parsley]

What kind of PDFs are you planning to read? As others have said, the real problem is that you have to shrink the document to fit on the screen (unless it's a document designed for a small piece of paper!). If the text is large and the margins wide, it can sometimes work with margin cropping + landscape mode. If you have multiple columns, you can crop down to only one column which helps a lot (but paging around becomes a huge pain). Reflow doesn't really work, sadly.

I do occasionally read PDFs on my 6" Kobo Clara in both the stock firmware and KOreader (I'm very nearsighted), but it isn't something I really enjoy. Textbooks + academic papers are a bad choice; product manuals are sometimes okay. I've never tried a scanned book, but I think it would probably be a frustrating experience.

Maybe try opening some of your PDFs on a computer and then sizing down the window until it matches the size of your desired ereader before committing?

[meeera]

Originally Posted by Shohreh

What model would you recommend for a 6" heavy-duty screen,

I don't think anyone addressed your request for a "heavy-duty" screen. No current e-ink device that I'm aware of has a heavy-duty screen; all have a paper-thin glass substrate. The past device Kobo Forma had a flexible substrate, so if this is a deal-breaker, consider that. Otherwise for both a heavy-duty screen and good PDF handling, a conventional tablet would fit the bill.

[Shohreh]

By "heavy-duty", I meant a device strong enough so that its screen doesn't break while travelling. Like I said, I had the Pocketbook Tea 3 repaired twice… before giving up and getting the Bookeen Saga, which I've been happily carrying around for years now.

As for the PDFs I'd like to read on that smaller device, they're just simple one-column documents (with footnotes), nothing fancy. Just that they're not available in EPUB.

I'll read up on KOReader to see if it handles PDF better than the stock application and well enough on a non-Amazon 6" device so that I don't have to bother with the k2pdfopt step.

Stiil curious to understand what the "reflow" option in my Bookeen does under the hood with native PDFs — change the x,y coordinates dynamically so that text chunks are moved around to fit the smaller screen?

[meeera]

Originally Posted by Shohreh

By "heavy-duty", I meant a device strong enough so that its screen doesn't break while travelling. L

Well, no screen will spontaneously shatter itself, short of an unusual issue like a swelling battery. It all depends how rough you are on them. For example, I've not managed to break a Kobo in a decade of having them and travelling with them, but some other people seem to break them one after the other while claiming that they couldn't possibly have broken them.

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by meeera

all have a paper-thin glass substrate. The past device Kobo Forma had a flexible substrate

Originally Posted by Shohreh

By "heavy-duty", I meant a device strong enough so that its screen doesn't break while travelling.

Paper-thin glass substrates are subject to shattering when the frame has been slightly flexed, as opposed to being dropped or some impact. A flexible substrate makes that less likely.

Originally Posted by meeera

Well, no screen will spontaneously shatter itself, short of an unusual issue like a swelling battery. It all depends how rough you are on them. For example, I've not managed to break a Kobo in a decade of having them and travelling with them, but some other people seem to break them one after the other while claiming that they couldn't possibly have broken them.

I think it has been a very long time since any e-ink device has been called out as being more prone to breakage than normal.

The metal Oasis models with glass front surface give the impression of being exceptionally rigid and strong, but I don't know whether that is actually the case.

I am also at a loss as to why some people experience breakage in device after device.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by j.p.s

I am also at a loss as to why some people experience breakage in device after device.

I guess some are just naturally rougher/more careless with their devices than others. Not consciously, it's just the way they are.